“I’m often asked to think about ways of building really low-cost affordable housing in the neighborhoods where I’ve worked,” said Oxenhandler, currently an architectural fellow at the People’s Emergency Center, a community development nonprofit in West Philadelphia. “It will be interesting to see how these more disposable houses are designed and built, and to think about ways that we can borrow these ideas in the U.S.”

Meanwhile, Halpern, 29 and a designer at Para-Project, a New York–based collaborative architecture firm, will apply the fellowship’s resources to challenge the way cities market themselves with predetermined urban panoramas. Using the panorama as a theoretical framework—an idea he first explored in his master’s thesis at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—he will travel through nine cities in Western Europe to develop alternative tourist literature.

“The way cities represent themselves claims you can learn the entire history of a city by following its official tourist itinerary,” Halpern says. “But you’re not going to learn anything that they don’t offer you.” In order to counter this reductive depiction of cities, Halpern will produce his own travel brochures, based on interactions with people and specific structures in each city.

Both Oxenhandler and Halpern will complete their trips before September 2018. They will have the opportunity to publish reports of their studies in Record.